The Extra the Vampire Bought Was Supposed to Die in Chapter Twelve novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Terms and Conditions

The Alpha rejects the mark in front of both courts. In the limo Cassia reads the CEO's contract clause by clause and rewrites it; the mark does not fade.

The Alpha walked the whole length of the aisle without taking his eyes off my wrist.

Nobody in that ballroom breathed.

Vampires on one side, wolves along the back wall, and me on a velvet block with a glowing tattoo I hadn't ordered.

I knew what came next, because I had read it, and I had rolled my eyes at it.

In the book, the heroine is the one on the block.

The Alpha stops in front of her, and the whole room watches him feel the bond slam into his chest.

Then he says something cruel, and she cries beautifully for two chapters.

He stopped in front of me.

He was close enough that I could see a scar splitting his left eyebrow, and a vein jumping in his neck.

"Mate," said somebody at the back, in an awed little whisper.

The Alpha flinched.

"No," he said.

His voice was rough and loud, and it carried to every wall.

"I am Brant Brodie, Alpha of the Lakeshore Pack, and I know the rite. Before both courts, I refuse this mark."

I felt it before I understood it.

Something under my ribs caught, and then it ripped.

My knees went out from under me, and the only reason I didn't hit the floor was Benedict Rhinelander's hand under my elbow.

"I refuse the bond," said the Alpha. "I refuse the woman. Let the moon take it back."

The pain went through my whole left arm and into my teeth.

Then it stopped.

I stood there shaking, a little drunk on the sudden absence of it.

The Alpha was white around the mouth.

He looked at me one more second, like he wanted to say something else and had no idea how.

Then he turned and walked out, and half the wolves went with him.

"Well," I said, to nobody. "I've been dumped by text and by voicemail."

I heard my voice shake.

"I have never been dumped by an Alpha in front of two hundred witnesses."

Benedict, still holding my elbow, made a sound that might have been a laugh.

"Walk with me, Miss Haverty."

"Do I have a choice?"

"You used your one refusal on Dorothea Lisle's bidder." He steered me through the crowd, which parted around us. "But you may sit down on the way out."

I didn't see Dorothea Lisle's box again.

The curtains were drawn.

Outside, the limousine smelled like leather and cold air.

He sat across from me with a leather folio on his knee and didn't touch me again.

"The contract," he said, and held it out.

It was twelve pages.

I read every clause with the little pen from his pocket, because a woman who has proofread leases for six years doesn't sign anything unmarked.

Clause one, a term of seventy-four days, ending at the blood moon.

Clause two, my father's debt, paid in full, with my name cleared and nothing owed after.

I read that one twice.

"You know the debt was only two hundred twelve thousand," I said.

"Yes."

"You bid four million."

"I wanted the bidding to stop."

Clause three put me in an apartment on the sixty-first floor of his tower. I could go out whenever I liked, but never without an escort.

"What's the escort for?"

"Dorothea Lisle," he said. "You refused her bidder in front of the whole Court. She doesn't forgive that."

That was fair. In the book, she didn't forgive anything.

Clause four said I had no duties at all.

"You paid four million dollars for no duties?" I said.

"Yes."

"That's not a clause. That's a red flag."

In the margin I wrote "and she keeps her own phone and her own hours," underlined it, and passed it back.

He read it under the dome light, lips moving slightly.

"Good catch," he said. "You also dropped a comma in clause two."

"That's what I do for a living."

"Did," he said, and then he looked at the window. "Did, in your last position."

"Mm," I said. "Sure."

Clause five said no other member of the Court could claim me or compel me.

I wrote a line under it saying he would never compel me either, and he initialed it without a word.

That was suspicious.

Villains in these books always argue.

Clause seven said, "The Parties shall not become romantically or physically involved."

I looked up.

"A no-romance clause?"

"Yes."

"Because I'm so irresistible?"

"Because you were bought," he said, and his voice had gone dry. "I don't want you to ever feel you owe me anything."

I looked at him for a long second.

I had read this man's chapters, and the Benedict Rhinelander in them would have written clause seven the other way around.

I kept reading.

Clause twelve, release at the blood moon, unharmed.

Clause nineteen, in small neat type.

"The Buyer's reasons for the purchase are sealed and shall not be disclosed."

"What does that mean?"

"It means what it says."

"It means you wrote a clause to avoid answering a question," I said. "I'm circling it."

I circled it twice.

"Circle all you like," said Benedict.

I signed, and he signed, and the car slid out onto Wacker Drive with the river black beside us.

I held my left wrist up under the light.

The moon mark was still there.

It didn't glow now, but it hadn't faded either, and I had just been rejected in front of two courts.

"Is this supposed to go away?" I asked.

He had gone very still, staring at it.

"Yes," said Benedict. "An hour at most. A rejected mark goes dark."

"It's been an hour."

"I know," he said. "That's what worries me."

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